February 2012
20 posts
Colin Kidd, "The End of Labour?" →
A relevant piece from the LRB on the Scottish question:
“The problem for Labour is not so much that Sheridan or Salmond is about to capture the bulk of the Labour vote, as that the Labour machine has anaesthetised its own constituency and New Labour has alienated it, bringing otherwise safe working-class constituencies, with low turnouts, into play…”
Steve Waldman, "Competitiveness is about capital... →
Gerald Holthman, "The Green Investment Bank: Do It... →
Steve Waldman, "Restraining unit labor costs is a... →
A terrific post that is highly relevant to the European debate on “competitiveness”.
Vicenç Navarro, "Salarios y competitividad" →
“Una postura sostenida por las élites gobernantes de la Unión Europea (UE), tales como el Consejo Europeo liderado por el binomio Merkel-Sarkozy, la Comisión Europea y el Banco Central Europeo, así como por los partidos conservadores que hoy gobiernan la mayoría de países del tal comunidad, es que los estados periféricos de la eurozona deben su estancamiento económico a un excesivo...
Peter Tatchell, "Economic democracy - The next big... →
Via Compass:
“One element of a sounder and more just economy is greater economic democracy: more participation, transparency, decentralisation and accountability. Here are a few ideas on how to begin the structural transformation of the economy:…”
The Onion - Tom Brady Cruelly Consolidates Power... →
“While acknowledging Tom Brady’s decision to betroth his sister Julie to savage, lecherous Kevin Youkilis may be morally repugnant on a personal level, Boston sports analysts said Thursday the move should consolidate the superstar’s power over the region’s fans….”Youkilis may not be a strategic genius, but he is powerful and unpredictable, and it’s better...
La omisión del BCE
Una traducción de mi última entrada para el Social Europe Journal:
El objetivo principal del BCE es mantener la estabilidad de precios, y mide la estabilidad de precios en términos del Índice de Precios de Consumo Armonizado (IPCA).[1] Como el principal indicador europeo de la inflación, el IPCA es por lo tanto un variable extremadamente importante para las políticas públicas.
Debido a las...
Ian Millhiser, "Josiah Bartlet Was A Mediocre... →
“President Bartlet had his moments — they just rarely had much to do with economic justice. Bartlet was a strong supporter of both gay rights and reproductive freedom, for example, and he deserves credit for negotiating a peace between Israel and Palestine. Ultimately, however, his presidency advances a very small kind of liberalism that appeals mostly to people who’ve never worried if they...
George Monbiot, "The Big Green Question" →
“…providing enough food for the 13% of the world’s people who suffer from hunger means raising world supplies by just 1%.
Providing electricity to the 19% of people who currently have none would raise global carbon emissions by just 1%.
Bringing everyone above the global absolute poverty line ($1.25 a day) would need just 0.2% of global income.
In other words, it is not the needs of...
Neal Lawson, "David Miliband's approach won't save... →
“Labour is in what Gramsci called an “interregnum”. The old is not yet dead, the new is not yet born. One paradigm needs to give way to the new. Only Labour can determine how long its interregnum lasts - it can be painful and partial or more quickly and fully resolved. The party can be blighted for decades by a generation of politicians who refuse to admit they got it wrong. In...
Michael Ehrmann and David-Jan Jansen, "The Pitch... →
From an ECB working paper:
“At the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, many soccer matches were played during stock market trading hours, providing us with a natural experiment to analyze fluctuations in investor attention. Using minute‐by‐minute trading data for fifteen international stock exchanges, we present three key findings. First, when the national team...
Dani Rodrik and Roberto Mangabeira Unger -... →
“This course will explore alternative ways of thinking about contemporary market economies and their reconstruction. It will do so by addressing three connected themes: the worldwide financial and economic crisis and the response to it, the effort to advance socially inclusive economic growth in richer as well as in poorer countries, and the past, present, and future of globalization. In...
Antonio Roldán, "El trilema de Europa" →
El amigo Toni ha publicado un gran artículo a El País:
“La crisis ha hecho emerger una de las verdades fundamentales de la Unión Monetaria Europea: la de la incompatibilidad entre las exigencias de la hiperglobalización económica y financiera y las demandas democráticas nacionales. Si queremos evitar vivir en una Europa posdemocrática, parafraseando a Havel, debemos entender que una Unión...
David S. Miller, "The Zuckerberg Tax" →
From the NY Times:
“A mark-to-market system of taxation on the top one-tenth of 1 percent would raise hundreds of billions of dollars of new revenue over the next 10 years. The new revenue could be used to lower payroll taxes, extend the George W. Bush tax cuts, repeal the alternative minimum tax, reduce the budget deficit, prevent military cuts or a combination of all of these.
This tax...
“It is no mystery that the Pope’s acts and words can enrage...”
– So claimed a rogue priest according to The Telegraph.
The Rise of the Indignados and the Collapse of...
I wrote this piece in November at the request of a few of my friends from JUSOS in Germany. I am happy to see that it has now been translated here:
On the 20th of November, the Partido Popular (PP) won a convincing majority in Spain’s general elections. The socialists (PSOE) suffered their worst defeat since the return of democracy to Spain. With only a few exceptions, the Spanish right now...
Joseph Stiglitz, "Capturing the ECB" →
From Project Syndicate: “The ECB’s behavior should not be surprising: as we have seen elsewhere, institutions that are not democratically accountable tend to be captured by special interests. That was true before 2008; unfortunately for Europe – and for the global economy – the problem has not been adequately addressed since then.”
